Significant Others - Claire Dederer on Reckoning with Problematic Artists

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

What is a fan to do with unsavory intel on their idol? Is it possible to separate the art from the artist? Should we even try?Claire’s book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is out now.

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in yesterday's episode, we learned about one of the more unusual love stories in the history of art. Today, we're joined by best-selling author Claire Dieterer, whose essays have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, the Paris Review, and the Atlantic, just to name a few. you and the Atlantic, just to name a few. Claire, thank you so much for doing this. I've been excited to talk to you in general, but also especially following the episode that we aired this week about Dali and his wife Gala. But before we get into that, I did want to start with your book, which is called Monsters, A Fan's Dilemma. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that subtitle and what it means to be a fan, because it's such a specific type of relationship to be in. Yeah, it's interesting that you've honed in on the subtitle because it was actually incredibly hard to write the subtitle. I kept trying to make it centered around the audience audience and the fan is really the core relationship here. And I think

what the fan indicates that the kind of chillier word audience doesn't sort of put across is the idea of love. A fan is connecting to the work with intensity, with all different kinds of emotion, but most of all with this kind of love and with a quality of personal relationship. The fan has a connection with the work that's beyond just a mere audience member or a mere admirer of the work. And the book is very much about trying to take apart what emotions are in place when an audience member, a fan, engages with a work of art. And so I really wanted that idea of emotion and love somehow encapsulated up front. piece of human experience. It feels like one of the things that really kicks in in a specific way, like in adolescence, you know, you notice that you may have been a fan of things before, but in adolescence, it starts to become like passionate and personal in a way, whether it's

like a rock star or a writer or whoever it is, even if it's, you know, a fellow student at school who you're not personally connected to, but you're a fan, you know, you're like obsessed with them or whatever. The big man on campus. Right. All schools have celebrities. That's so true. Yeah. But as I was thinking about it, I was thinking about how it's such a, you're in such a protected position as a fan. You're so kind of safe because there's no onus on you in the relationship to hold up any end of the bargain other than whatever transactional of in my life, and there have been too many to remember at this point, but they do feel formative to me. I don't know if that's a thing that you relate to at all, if there are people, you know, icons that you have been a fan of that felt sort of part and parcel of your development as an artist? Yeah, maybe before even becoming a writer and artist myself, that intense connection with an artist that you feel, especially when you're, as you said, in adolescence.

In adolescence, and it's a way, there's a way of being very into something that's a rite of passage in growing up. And, you know, it's an interesting dynamic because it's a really incredible feeling. I think it's akin in many ways to falling in love. And I know that for me, as I get older, I crave that feeling. You know, it's harder to find the fandom inside yourself it certainly is as you get older so that is you know that when i find a writer i really love or i fall in love with a band you know if i fall in love with a band now forget it i'm going on tour with them like i'm gonna be with them as much as i can and not that i would interact with them but you know i want to see them as many times

as possible because that feeling is so rare. Yeah. Do you feel like it's got a shorter expiration date? You know what I mean? Like when I, you know, whoever I was obsessed with when I was 13, 14, I think I just never reconsidered that and I stayed a fan forever. But now if I found something that made me swoon, I would be excited. But then I could see it like going away quick. Right. You know, I don't know. Yeah. I do think those things that take hold of you when you are young, never let go.

My partner is a music biographer. So he's and he's a little bit older than me. So he's he'd really appreciate my saying that. But he's, you know, as a child was obsessed with the Beatles and the Beach Boys and these bands, and he's still writing about them now. And I think that, you know, it's really interesting how those artists connect with the person you were at the time, but they also help make our cultural history, right? Like, there's a way that that shared fandom becomes something that identifies you as part of a cohort, an age group, or other kind of in-group. I think that, you know, fandom obviously has become much, much more intense. It's, you know, it's, I think you can look back centuries and

see fandom, but I think it's become accelerated and sort of more unavoidable in the era of mass culture. And then especially in the era we live in now when we know so much about everyone. You know, I write in the book about how we're in this biographical moment where, you know, when I was young, if I loved an artist, I couldn't find out anything about them. I remember reading a biography of Deanna Arbus and just like holding this book like it was talismanic. She was a person, you know, that was so stunning to me. But now, of course, biography is what people's biographies, all of those things. And so we can't sort of, that's what makes the mergo. It's the money of the internet. And we can't escape the biography. And the fandom becomes different, right? It becomes more connected. It becomes more personal. It becomes what I talk about in the book, and a lot of people use this term, becomes a parasocial relationship, where because of the intensity of one's connection to the artist, the audience member feels that the artist must have the same connection with him or her. Right. And it's so depressing when you realize they don't. They don't have that connection. They don't. And it's such a letdown and such a human thing, obviously, to have that moment. but I might just go into it now because it's coming up. I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel, especially in the context of everything that you grapple with in your book, which is to say the difficulties of appreciating the work of people who are deeply flawed in dangerous ways, and that it's such a personal thing to sort of hold someone up and say,

this speaks to me, this sort of helps reflect who I am. And to feel that that is sullied by, you know, bad behavior or, you know, some sort of true mental illness. I've got to get that back out of me because I took it in. And there's a lot of pressure in sort of not just liking something, but then sharing your feelings about a thing. I don't know. I feel very like it's all really treacherous that like, what if I like something that we find out later was created by a person who we all, you know, can't abide, what does that say about me if I liked it? And then also, what if I've told someone, like I had this moment, and I think you write about a similar thing in the book at one point, but when I was in college, I went to see a movie that I cannot remember the title of, but it had, I think it was like Susan Sarandon and James Spader, maybe. And it was one of those like May-December romance, you know, types of stories. And it was, to me, I was just like, okay, it was a movie. It was sort of pop entertainment. I didn't worry too much about it. And I was so happy to get off campus and go see a movie, you know,

whatever. And I went with these two friends and we were talking about it afterwards and I said, oh, I really liked it. And they were like, how could you like it? She raped him. And I was like, what? I didn't, what? Like, I kind of almost didn't get that. And I felt so ashamed that I had not, you know, I hadn't flagged that thing that was clearly, you know, very problematic and disturbing and I had not, you know, I hadn't flagged that thing that was clearly, you know, very problematic and disturbing. And I had let it sail past me, but then also that I had been sort of dumb enough to telegraph affection for this thing that was clearly like a piece of excrement, you know? And so that's all a very long setup to the question, which is, do you feel the same way, first of all? And if so, or if you, you know, sort of get that feeling in general, do you think we will ever move back away from this, like, public square type of moment and back into a space where we can kind of have our own personal preferences and they don't have to stand for everything. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because we opened this conversation talking about how, as a fan member, you sort of are in a dynamic with someone in which you have no role.

But a thing that has changed for us in, you know, now, this idea of the public square is that it's not just you saying to your friends in a private conversation, I loved that film, but suddenly your taste and who you are and what you like is this expression of the self. And I think there is really value in the way that taste makes us who we are and talking about our taste and sharing our tastes i think that you know that's part of identity um the problem is right that we have this moment of biography of sort of overwhelming biography and so often we find out someone whose work we adore has done something bad or something distasteful or just something human, right? Like sometimes these terrible things that people do are just things that normal people do, you know, have a divorce or whatever it might be. And I think one of the issues that happens is

when we love something and we say we love something. And then the person who's made that thing turns out to have done something not absolutely A1 perfect or something truly terrible, you know, anywhere on that spectrum. We sort of have been confronted with one answer to that, which is either you throw out the work altogether or you separate the art from the artist. And it was this kind of, this really stark bifurcation of these two options. I think that there's a, I'm losing a word that I'm looking for right now, but it's this, you know, this, this really dual. Dichotomy. Dichotomy. Thank you. This dichotomy. I wouldn't say it's a false dichotomy. I would say that it's one that has a lot of other behaviors in between. And for some people, you know, throwing out the work absolutely is the right thing to do. And your decision to throw out that work might be based in your own experience and your own biography. And that's what fascinated

me writing the book is we talk so much about the artists and their biographies, but of course, when we come to the work, we come with our own biographies. So there's this kind of, you know, we don't, as you said, we don't do anything in the relationship and yet we exist and we have our own story. So maybe if somebody is accused of something terrible and you're a survivor of sexual violence, it's a clear line for you. You throw it out. Maybe it doesn't affect you in the same way. Or maybe, you know, I talk in the book about a friend who was really closeted through his adolescence and movies really saved his life. And for him, always separate the art from the artist because he needs the art so much right so and then there's everything in between um so i think when the

question immediately devolves to separate the art from the artist or throw the art out it's kind of um that was that seemed like a starting point to me you know i was more interested in all the other things that could happen because the fact is being told to separate the art from the artist doesn't work. Like you can, right. It's, it's already occurred. It's the two things are conflated. And so it's not a helpful locution and maybe you love the work too much to throw it out. Right. So as you say, if you're sort of in this morass of feelings where so many of us find ourselves when we're confronted with this rotten deed by this great artist, you know, how do we behave in that town square, right? What does it look like when we're there? Does it look like, you know, do you have to take a stand?

Do you have to feel shame? Do you have to denounce the artist but still uphold the work? I mean, I don't really think there's a right answer. For me, I think, though, that there's a really interesting answer in stepping out of the dynamic. in the book, but I've thought about it a lot over the last year since the book came out. And I've become more and more interested in knowing very little about work before I consume it and saying very little about work after I consume it. Except for, you know, if you and I were talking over a cup of coffee. But, you know, I'd love to support other writers publicly, but I started to notice more and more in myself this compulsion to express the self through the statement about the art in the town square. And I feel that it was ultimately eroding what was good and pure in that band dynamic. So I'm sort of interested in just

absolving myself of that responsibility for a bit. And I don't know how that sounds to you. Well, it's making me think about, because I think time is obviously a factor as well, that we can have experiences at one point in our lives that resonate a certain way, and then as we gain experience, they resonate differently, or as we learn something, then it changes our retrospective view of it.

What I hate the most is this fallacy that things can be kind of expunged from the record. I think that's a very damaging illusion that sometimes people invoke, even if they don't mean to, about, you know, should this ever have existed at all or should we ever have left it at all? I think that's what happened, you know, what happened happened. And let's not worry ourselves with trying to go back, you know. But I find that dynamic of time also impacting me as I move forward. For example, with Michael Jackson, when people all watched the documentary about him, and kind of their stomachs were turned and they couldn't enjoy the music anymore. And I have not watched the documentary yet. And I think it's partly I'm loathe to engage sometimes

in, you know, some of that rough stuff. But I also wonder if I'm trying to preserve, you know, my plausible deniability a little bit. Yeah, there's a lot actually about that documentary. And I didn't watch it for a long time for similar reasons. And did it hit you a certain way when you finally did? I don't know. I mean, I think that it, yes, it made the art harder to consume. Yes, it changed my experience of him. Does it change my experience of him when he was a child, when he was being exploited? You know, these are questions

about identity. Did he, do you sort of, does the stain travel backwards and forwards in time? Or does it just affect what we know he made after he, you know, after the accusations took place? Suddenly you find yourself involved in this like parsing and this sort of judicious trying to figure out what's what. And I don't necessarily think that that's our responsibility as a fan. Right. I tend to agree with you. I'm also thinking about like Alana Ferrante, the writer who's one of my all-time favorites and who it's, you know, it's a pseudonym and the identity until very recently was completely opaque. And when I first discovered her work, I was driven a little bit mad by that, right? That like, but who is it? Who is it? And what's the story? And why is it secret? And now that it's been

revealed, I'm sort of like, it was more fun when it was the cipher, you know? Right, right, right. So yes, the biography of that writer is touching you. But at the same time, what you're really enjoying is the absence of biography because that's so refreshing at this point you're just sort of wanting to know less i had this this is sort of going to be vaguely name droppy but i when i was in new york for book tour i by accident met uh carrie brownstein from portlandia and slater kinney and like a great artist in her own right. And just started chatting with her and she was roaming the city looking for art she knew nothing about. Oh, wow. And I thought about- How interesting.

Really interesting. So it's like she wanted everyone to be Ferrante, right? Like, please cloak everything in mystery. Right, right. I mean, I am burdened by very little knowledge of art, and so that makes it very easy for me to encounter art I know nothing about pretty much anywhere I go. So she should just embrace ignorance, as I have. So the episode that this conversation is following talks about Salvador Dali and his wife Gala, and she was quite problematic in her own right on a number of counts. It's very hard to get any verified nuggets of actual truth about either of these people. But there is a sort of biography that was written about her that way that ambition could, you know, activate itself, which was to attach to a man. And that got her a modicum of, you know, whatever she wanted, security, fame, money. And I'm curious to know what you think about,

And I'm curious to know what you think about this as one of those annoyingly vast subjects. But I do think in general things are better for women in our culture anyway than they were in the mid-20th century. But I also, I was just rereading, I don't know if you've read that On Pandering essay by Clarifay Watkins, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's great. And she wrestles with some of what you are wrestling with in some of your essays, too, which is this sort of what is it to be a female artist? What is it to be a woman in the world? And how are we naturally, you know, relegated to some different kind of level of ability or whatever?

you know, relegated to some different kind of level of ability or whatever. So I guess my question is, do you think that there are, because Claire Watkins' essay was written recently, like in the last 10 years, and she's writing about how she recognizes that the domineering gaze in writing and most art is white and male. And if you're not that, you're always trying to catch up and sort of speak to that and adopt that persona. And that the ambition has more roots now than it did maybe in the mid-20th century for someone like Gala Dali. for someone like Gala Dali. But how different do you think it really is for us? Like, you know, are we, how liberated are we or could we ever be? Just answer that. It's a really small question. Yeah, just get right to the bottom of that one. Well, I love the line from On Pandering when Clara Watkins says, I have built a working reproduction of the patriarchy inside my head. And I think that that, so there's sort of, to me, two parts of your, I mean, of course, there's a million parts to your question.

Million parts, yes. I apologize. No, no, no, it's great. It's overwhelming. No, it's, this is what I think about all day long. So I think that, you know, when you think about ways that women or other outgroups are maybe held back, but let's just talk specifically about women, are held back, part of it is the working model of the patriarchy that we have inside our heads, right? It's an internal oppression of the self because we, you know, because of internalized misogyny. And then on the other hand, there are external structures, and those are also real. What I've thought about mostly is

the ways that motherhood and art come into conflict. So that was the book. My book does deal a lot with gender, but for me, I'm looking at it through the lens of motherhood quite a bit in particular, and the ways in which, and that doesn't quite so much relate to Galadali, right? I don't think that mothering was on the list of things that she cared about perfecting. Right. So she actually kind of does funnel into one of the ideas I deal with in the book, which is the idea of the abandoning mother. Right. And she did abandon her child for a while. Pretty much. Yes. And so one of the ideas that fascinates me is that, you know, men do this whole range Pretty much. the idea I'm dealing with. And I think this problem of the conflict between motherhood and

art is the one that's of most interest to me. And it does kind of go to some of the essential problems of being, in general, a woman and an artist, which is there is an expectation that you will perform care. And there's an expectation that, you know, you'll make your art fit around that. And so for me, that's the kind of center of, I know there's a lot of other structural issues that we could talk about, but that's not really my area. I became fascinated by this place

where you sort of want to be monster enough to shut the door and make the work, but you feel terrible about it. And at the same time, if you're not make the work, but you feel terrible about it. And at the same time, if you're not doing the work that you feel called to do, that has its own sort of tension in it or agony, right? Absolutely. And I think that there's, you know, this is something that has been written about, obviously, in the past. I think The Golden Notebook does a

really beautiful job getting at the clash between its main characters' identities as an artist and a woman. But it's something that is really coming to the fore right now. A lot of people are writing about it. I'm doing an event with Leslie Jameson tonight about her new memoir, Splinters, and it deals with this image. Kate Zambrino just wrote a book about art and care. There's a book called The Baby on the Fire Escape about female artists trying to figure out how to take care of their children or not. And I think that it's having a moment as a topic. it's become this kind of, it's having a moment as a topic. And I feel like what often gets talked about is this idea of, well, how do you make the art with the baby there? And as I think about it more and more, it seems to me that the real question is, why are we the only ones thinking about care, right? So the structural problem isn't necessarily whether or not we get

to make art. The structural problem is that care has become so siloed into this very narrow idea of who does it. And I think that, to me, any kind of way forward has to do with expanding, Any kind of way forward has to do with expanding, somehow expanding what caregiving looks like, you know, and who does it. So that it's not just left to women to try to cram everything into the 24 hours of the day. And there's, you know, there's obviously class and racial elements in this conversation as well. But when that work is spread out, that is is what would change structurally and it's i mean that would be basically a dismantling of patriarchy obviously it's not going to occur but if we can get away from women saying i need more time to write and or make a painting and

get toward like you you know this this other focus time for your your yeah your shifts on yeah exactly so yeah that's sort of one of the ways I'm thinking about, you know, that even this dialogue about shifting who does the care, I think, is something that is a development from, say, 50 or 75 years ago. Right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. That's great. line with that question, I wanted to ask you about this quote that you gave about the original essay, I believe, that was the kernel for the book itself, and that you said that piece has been read and engaged with by more men than anything else that you've ever written.

And I'm fascinated by that. I'm wondering, A, why you think it is, but also curious what kinds of things they have to say about it and how that might differ from any of your women readers. All right. Well, my first reading of this situation is strictly, is very cynical. That I think that somewhere along the way, that piece, I became, through that piece, the feminist who says it's okay to watch Woody Allen movie. I see. I think that there was a utility. I mean, sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.

Well, I was thinking it's because it's about, I mean, not that, you know, you don't talk about men in anything else that you've written, but it's about them. It's as much as it's about, I mean, not that, you know, you don't talk about men in anything else that you've written, but it's about them. It's as much as it's about you. Even simpler. Yeah. Yeah.

It's about them. So there's that. Yeah. I do think that both of those things are true, right? Like I'm turning my attention and gaze back on men in this piece very explicitly. very explicitly. I do think that while my work is not prescriptive in general, I pretty much fall on the idea that, I mean, the work, the essay, and then ultimately the book, what I really tried to do was valorize subjectivity, that everybody's decision,

it's a decision that has to be made by each person. Because of what I talked about earlier about the way that the audience's biography is just as important as the artist's biography when it comes to that moment of connection, right? And so I do think that there's a lot of autonomy in how each person makes that decision. And the book and my thinking is really not very prescriptive. It's more trying to describe what happens. So I do think there's something to the idea that it's a very feminist work, but it does sort of let you make your own decision. I think that's appealing.

But I also am fascinated by how many men I hear from, one way or another, who have read the book as an affirmation, because I write a lot about the idea of motherhood and being monster enough, being selfish enough to shut the door and do the work. I hear a lot from men who are inspired by that, to shut the door and do the work. Oh, interesting. It's really interesting. I wonder if there's more of a struggle for the dads than we're used to acknowledging. Yeah, or if the dads feel like there's more of a struggle for the dads. You know, I mean, what do they know? Well, I mean, sure. Well, it may feel like a struggle. You're right. It may be more of an internal struggle, even if what they're struggling with is needing to do 10 or 20 or 30 percent of the work. Right.

In a heterosexual marriage, we'll just say. marriage, we'll just say. So that doesn't mean it's not a struggle for them. But it is fascinating how many men don't read the book saying, oh, I have to create more, you know, I have to do more care so that the other half of the world can make more art. It's sort of, thank you for the permission. I got one letter, I don't think I'm giving any details away from a woman who wrote to me because her husband had read my essay, left her and their kids and moved into a garret by himself to paint all the time. True story. I mean, I don't know if it's true, but it's true that I received this letter. So truly, we can have no control over what happens to our words when they go out in the world but the men's response has been interesting that's a whole twist on it like what do you do if

you have abominable fans if you're an artist and your fans are reprehensible that's a whole new problem um i wanted to ask you about the cover art because your um your paperback edition is coming out in April, which is going to be next month. And the cover art on the hardback book is so arresting. It's this kind of great photo of a guy in a swimsuit with like a bull's head mask on. And he looks kind of like it's, hey, it's like that Midsommar movie. It's that kind of a tone of creepy but also fun and then the paperback has two women on the cover who are clearly you know talking thinking deliberating that kind of thing so i'm just curious if there were like internal conversations about changing that up yeah yeah yeah so So the original cover image is Picasso on the beach, which many, many people don't know. So it's sort of a little hidden factlet. It's an image that I

found from Life magazine early on in the project of writing the book, and I put it over my desk. And it just seemed to me to be everything about the book in one image. His virility, being celebrated in this image, the fact that he's wearing a monster's head, the fact that he's reveling in wearing a monster's head. I write in the book about how Picasso and Hemingway did this incredible job of kind of soldering together the image of male monstrosity and the idea of genius so that they were sort of inextricably combined. And here he is doing that in the moment. And of course, you know, he's so connected to the idea of bulls and bullfighting. But so when I first, when, so I just floated it, I didn't know what would happen, but I, that was my dream to have that be the cover. And really excitingly, it was. But the other idea was always how do we represent the audience, this idea of the fan. Because the book, as you said earlier, you know, like in this essay, I was giving men my attention, but the book is really not about the artists. It's about the audience members. And there would have been a way to write the book where I could have just cataloged every rotten man who ever did anything. But I sort of chose a handful of characters, and each one is used to illustrate a different

aspect of the audience experience. So the audience is really what shapes the book structurally. And the idea of having the audience foregrounded on the cover is much more inviting than having Picasso for a lot of women. And so they were able, somebody at Knopf was able to find this amazing image of what my daughter, my daughter saw the cover and wrote me a note and said, I love these bitchy women because they're sort of sitting in what looks like a movie seat watching a movie and they're kind of, you can see they're talking trash.

And it's sort of their animations of what the book is doing in some ways. It's kind of the perfect antithesis to what the hardback book offers. Yeah, I was really thrilled when they sent it to me. I was really pleased. That's great. My final question that I always ask everyone is about whether or not there's a person or a thing, you know, an experience, a book or whatever that has been particularly formative, sort of like a significant other for your trajectory. But before you answer that, I did want to ask if you could recount the anecdote that you tell about your seventh grade teacher, because I think it's such a perfect version of one of those about how she kind of identified you as a critic. Right. So she says, you know, you're really a critic,

essentially. And you wonder on the page, did she, you know, show me who I was? Or did she kind of doom me to being this, that I was cursed by her to become this thing? So I thought that was such a great example of a significant other. Oh, I love that. That's great. Yeah. So actually, this is an anecdote. I've tried to work into every book I've ever written. And thank God it didn't go in my earlier books because it was perfect in this book when I was starting to write about my experience having spent my working life in part as a critic. And I tell this story about, I was in seventh grade and I was just, you know, I'm just a seventh grader. Like I'm in my painter's pants and my baseball jersey and my, I have so many tangles in my hair that like, I can't get a brush through it. And just like,

I'm a mess. And my, my English teacher who I worshiped, she was just my first intellectual, right? She was the first person who was so consumed by books and so almost unforgiving in the way she talked about books. I mean, she was everything I loved and wanted to be. And she called me up to her desk after class one day, and she said, Claire, and she always sort of looked like she would be smoking or smoking the chalk, right? She wasn't smoking in this moment, but just picture her holding a cigarette. She said, Claire, I noticed that you think about things so hard. You'll think about a person or a book or yourself,

and you'll think and think about it until you find something wrong with it. And then she said, you might find that harder as you go along in life. It is like a fairytale witch, like giving you a poison apple that's going to give you superpowers, but also it's going to hurt. Right. Yes. A very rich black stick arriving at my side. Yeah. So, you know, it's really interesting. Did she make me into what I was, you know, that terrible thing, a critic? Or was it there all along, like dormant, waiting to be born? Right. That's funny. Well, I did want to give you the opportunity also to answer that question in any way that you might like, aside from my answering it for you. Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. I would say that for me,

there's, I know people have issues with her, but for me, the person, the writer who sort of was so important to me when I was young, starting even when I was in middle school, was Pauline Kael. The way that she both, she emotionally responded to work, but she also was so smart at revealing the truths that lay underneath what the film said it was doing. And she was also incredibly emotional in her response. And so what she brought forward in her reviews was the drama of coming to her opinion, right? And I loved that when I was young. And I think that one of the reasons critical writing was so important to me, you know, when you read personal writing, when you read a memoir, you're allowed into the memoirist's experience and you're allowed into the memoirist's experience, and you're allowed to sort of see the world through their eyes. But when you're reading critical work, you have consumed the same

piece of art that the critic has consumed. So you're coming out of this kind of shared vault of experiences, and it's incredibly intimate. And I loved all critical writing from the time I was in middle school but Pauline Kael was the one who made me feel like less alone honestly that's great thank you for that thank you for all of this this was really really fun thank you so much for having me it's lovely be sure to check out Claire's book Monsters a Fan Dilemma, available in paperback on April 23rd. And join us next time for the season two finale of Significant Others to learn about Karl Marx, the family man. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples.

Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown. Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi, and Joanna Solitaroff. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.